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A new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and the Robert Butler Columbia Aging Center and Université Paris-Dauphine — PSL, found that having three or more versus two children has a negative effect on late-life cognition. The results further indicated that this effect was strongest in Northern Europe, where higher fertility decreases financial resources but does not improve social resources in this region. This is the first to study the causal effect of high fertility on late-life cognition.
Until now fertility has not received much attention as a potential predictor of late-life cognition compared with other factors, such as education or occupation. The findings are published in the journal Demography.
“Understanding the factors that contribute to optimal late-life cognition is essential for ensuring successful aging at the individual and societal levels — particularly in Europe, where family sizes have shrunk and populations are aging rapidly,” said Vegard Skirbekk, PhD, professor of population and Family health at Columbia Mailman School. “For individuals, late life cognitive health is essential for maintaining independence and being socially active and productive in late life. For societies, ensuring the cognitive health of the older population is essential for extending work lives and reducing health care costs and care needs,” said Eric Bonsang, PhD, professor of economics at the Université Paris-Dauphine — PSL.
The researchers analyzed data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to examine the extent to which having three or more children versus two children causally affects late-life cognition. SHARE surveys representative samples of the older populations in 20 European countries and Israel including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Participants were aged 65 or older who had at least two biological children.
Based on advanced econometric methods able disentangle causality from simple associations, the evidence suggests that that having three or more versus two children is related to worse late-life cognition. They also found that this effect is similar for both men and women.
Fertility may affect late-life cognition via several pathways. First, having an additional child often incurs considerable financial costs, reduces family income and increases the likelihood of falling below the poverty line, thus decreasing the standard of living for all family members and possibly causing financial worries and uncertainties, which could contribute to cognitive deterioration.
Second, having an additional child is causally related to women’s lower labor market participation, fewer hours worked, and lower earnings. In turn, labor force participation — compared with retirement — positively affects cognitive functioning among men and women.
Third, having children decreases the risk of social isolation among older individuals which is a key risk factor for cognitive impairment and dementia, and often raises the level of social interaction and support, which can be protective against cognitive decline at older ages.
Finally, having children can be stressful, affect health risk behaviors and adversely affect adult cognitive development. Parents with more children can experience more stress, have less time to relax and invest in cognitively stimulating leisure activities. This can imply sleep deprivation for the parent.
“The negative effect of having three or more children on cognitive functioning is not negligible, it is equivalent to 6.2 years of aging,” noted Bonsang. It suggests that the decrease in the proportion of Europeans having three or more children may have positive implications for the cognitive health of the older population.
“Given the magnitude of the effect, future studies on late-life cognition should also examine fertility as a prognosticator alongside more commonly researched predictors, such as education, occupational experiences, physical exercise, and mental and physical health,” observed Skirbekk. “In addition, future studies should address the potential effects of childlessness or having one child on late-life cognition. We also need more information on the types of interactions, supports, and conflicts that occur between parents and children, which may influence cognitive outcomes.”
The study was supported by the Health Chair — a joint initiative by PSL, Université Paris-Dauphine, ENSAE, MGEN, and ISTYA under the aegis of the Fondation du Risque (FDR).

Treating pregnant women with opioid use disorder can help minimize opioid-related brain abnormalities in their newborns.
Led by scientists at Cedars-Sinai, this is the first study to report evidence validating the benefits of using medication for opioid use disorder during pregnancy. Brain imaging revealed significant improvements in brain function after treatment. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal JNeurosci.
“We are in a nationwide opioid crisis, so there’s an urgent need for us to better understand how opioid exposure in pregnant women impacts their children,” said senior author of the study Wei Gao, PhD, director of Neuroimaging Research at the Biomedical Imaging Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai and professor of Biomedical Sciences. “Using imaging techniques can help us identify the risks as early as possible so that we can hopefully intervene and minimize the potential adverse impacts on the developing fetal brain.”
Prenatal exposure to opioids and other drugs represents a serious public health concern. The number of pregnant women using opioids has more than quadrupled in the United States between 1999 and 2014. Opioid exposure can alter or impact early brain growth, which can cascade into a myriad of issues that affect social-emotional skills, cognition and behavior.
Despite numerous studies on prenatal opioid exposure, little is known on the neural mechanisms underlying the benefits of the medications — buprenorphine and methadone, among others — that are used to stabilize opioid levels that the fetus is exposed to while in the womb.
To better understand how this class of drugs affects the developing brain and the value of maternal treatments, Gao and his team used advanced resting-state functional MRI imaging to compare the brains of newborns who were prenatally exposed to one or both of the medications with those exposed to opioids, but without any medication.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, SolStockSpain is planning to introduce medical leave for women who suffer from severe period pain, media reports suggest.A draft bill says women could have three days of leave a month – extended to five in some circumstances.But politicians warned that the draft – leaked to Spanish media outlets – was still being worked on.If passed, it would be the first such legal entitlement in Europe. Only a handful of countries around the world have such legislation in place.The Spanish legislation is part of a much wider reproductive health reform which will include changes to the country’s abortion laws.Media outlets who have seen portions of the law report that it is due to be presented to cabinet early next week.Three-day sick leave for painful periods will be allowed with a doctor’s note, the draft says, potentially extending to five on a temporary basis for particularly intense or incapacitating pain. But it is not expected to apply to those who suffer mild discomfort. It is part of a wider approach of treating menstruation as a health condition, El País reports, which also includes the abolishing of VAT on some hygiene products – the so-called “tampon tax” – and free hygiene products being made available at public centres such as schools and prisons.The draft also includes extended paid maternity leave before childbirth and changes to abortion laws outlined earlier this year by Equality Minister Irene Montero.That includes removing the requirement of aged 16 and 17 to have an abortion without the permission of their parents or guardians, which was introduced in 2015 by another government. It also eliminates a current three-day cooling-off period, and a requirement for abortion services to be provided in the public healthcare system.But doctors in traditionally Roman Catholic Spain will still be able to sign up to a register of conscientious objectors, El País reports. The proposed law will also include tighter rules around surrogacy, which is banned in Spain.This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.More on this storySpain seeks abortion law changeActivists cheer as ‘sexist’ tampon tax is scrappedViewpoint: ‘Why every woman should be offered menstrual leave’Airline ex-CEO fined for refusing menstrual leaveTeachers’ fight for period leave gathers steam

Vascular diseases are public enemy number one: the leading killers worldwide, accounting for nearly a third of all human deaths on the planet.
Continuous monitoring of hemodynamics — blood flow through the vascular system — can improve treatments and patient outcomes. But deadly conditions like hypertension and atherosclerosis occur in long and twisting vascular system with arteries of varying diameter and curvature, and existing clinical devices are limited by their bulk, rigidity, and utility.
Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Woon-Hong Yeo and his collaborators are trying to improve the odds for patients with development of an implantable soft electronic monitoring system. Their new device, consisting of a smart stent and printed soft sensors, is capable of wireless real-time monitoring of hemodynamics without batteries or circuits.
“This electronic system is designed to wirelessly deliver hemodynamic data, including arterial pressure, pulse, and flow, to an external data acquisition system, and it is super small and thin, which is why we can use a catheter to deliver it, anywhere inside the body,” said Yeo, whose team released its study this week in the journal Science Advances.
Yeo added, smiling, “It’s like a stent with multiple tricks up its sleeve.”
For example, when this device is installed in a patient with atherosclerosis, in addition to expanding and preventing the artery from narrowing, like a traditional stent, restoring normal blood flow, it will also provide a constant flow of data.
“Now, once you have deployed a stent, you’re not sure if the problem was resolved and patients may come back with the same issue,” Yeo said. “It can be a defect of the stent, or an issue with stent deployment, or perhaps a problem with the patient’s blood flow.”
And the current standard way to monitor all of that is with an angiogram. That can be expensive and in rare instances, particularly with patients also struggling with diabetes, the dyes and radiation used in angiogram imaging can cause cancer. Yeo’s system seeks to circumvent the need for an angiogram or other imaging requirements.
His wireless smart stent platform, integrated with soft sensors, is operated by inductive coupling to offer wireless real-time monitoring that can detect a wide range of vascular conditions. Inductive coupling uses magnetic fields for wireless energy transfer. It’s similar to what’s happening when you use a wireless charger for your phone, smartwatch, or other devices — they are gaining energy from the magnetic field created by the charger.
“Basically, you can put this sensor system anywhere inside the body,” Yeo explained. “The other thing about this technology platform is, in addition to being an implantable sensor system, it can be used as a wearable system. Think about a smartwatch and how much of its bulk is taken up by circuits or batteries. If you remove all of that, you have a device that is thinner than a typical Band-Aid, an almost invisible health monitor that you can wear anywhere.”
That’s the long-range goal, anyway. So far, they’ve tested their wireless implantable system on animal models. However, there is still plenty of work to do. And Yeo also has the backing of the National Science Foundation to advance the technology. He recently received a 3-year, $400,000 grant from NSF focused on his printed nanomembrane sensors and bioelectronics for wireless and continuous monitoring of vascular health.
“We believe that the mechanical, material, and electrical design principles we develop, and the engineering and biosensing framework that results from this work, will advance the field of implantable electronics and biomedical systems,” Yeo said. “And the insights and knowledge we gain will be applicable for other physiological processes and challenges in biomedical science and engineering.”

New research conducted by the UAB with road cyclists, published in the journal PeerJ, sheds light on the importance of monitoring a training session load with the use of heart rate variability measuring tools, to favour assimilation and prevent injuries, and to compare training intensity with mood states the following morning.
To build fitness, athletes must apply stress to the body, and then through recovery, the body adapts and is able to accommodate greater stress in the next round of training. Maintaining reasonable amounts of stress and promoting recovery is essential to ameliorate the performance of athletes, as well as to prevent injuries and problems associated with overtraining.
Researchers from the Laboratory of Sport Psychology and the Sport Research Institute at the UAB have studied the effects training intensity has on road cyclists in terms of mood states and their capacity to adapt to greater training loads, assessed using heart rate variability (HRV).
The research, published in the journal PeerJ, was conducted through a six-week analysis of the answers five amateur road cyclists gave of the physical stress they endured during training. Once completed, the cyclists also responded questionnaires on how they had perceived the physical exertion of their training. The following morning they measured their HRV and recorded their mood state.
The researchers argue that a change in mood and/or HRV — measured using the HFnu (normalised high frequency band) parameter — in athletes the day after training could serve as indicator of training intensity, signalling whether the training had been adequate or too intense for the physical state of the athlete. The study observed that the more intense the training, the lower the mood on the following day, and also the lower the HRV. In contrast, high HFnu was associated with an improvement in the mood of athletes, which indicated that there is a relationship between HRV and mood states.
“The objective of the research was to explore the relation among three aspects: training, heart rate variability and mood,” explains researcher of the UAB Department of Basic Psychology Carla Alfonso. “With this study we aimed to know when an athlete must rest, because their system is saturated, and when an athlete can train, with more or less intensity, because their body is ready to assimilate the training load.”
The results obtained are a first step in “setting up a monitoring system which takes into account both internal and external training loads, in addition to mood state and heart rate variability of the athlete, with the aim of helping them adapt to their training and prevent injuries that may come with overtraining,” concludes Professor Lluís Capdevila of the UAB Department of Basic, Developmental and Educational Psychology, and co-author of the study.
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Materials provided by Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A vaccine for eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV), western equine encephalitis virus (WEEV), and Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEEV) was found to be safe, well-tolerated and induced a neutralizing antibody response in adult volunteers, according to newly published results from a Phase 1 clinical trial. The vaccine candidate was developed by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center (VRC), part of the National Institutes of Health. NIAID also sponsored and funded the clinical trial, which was conducted at the Emory Vaccine Center’s Hope Clinic, part of Emory University in Atlanta. The study appears online today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
EEEV, WEEV and VEEV are spread to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes. Horses are also susceptible to infection, but horses cannot transmit the viruses directly to humans. Infections in humans are rare but can lead to flu-like symptoms and, in some cases, severe neurological damage or death. The viruses have caused recurrent, small outbreaks in North, Central and South America, including an EEEV outbreak in 2019 in the northeastern United States that led to 38 confirmed cases and 15 deaths.
Under certain laboratory conditions, the viruses can transmit through the air by aerosol droplets and cause infection in humans and are therefore classified as priority pathogens, potential biological agents that pose a risk to national security and public health. NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., and colleagues have highlighted the possible utility of a vaccine for EEEV for people at high occupational risk of contracting the disease, including members of the military and laboratory workers.
Building on their successful development of a vaccine for chikungunya virus, VRC researchers designed a virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine candidate (abbreviated WEVEE) that uses proteins from the outer shells of the EEE, WEE and VEE viruses to prompt an immune response. VLPs do not contain the genetic material that the viruses need to replicate inside cells, so VLPs cannot cause infection.
For the Phase 1 clinical trial, 30 healthy adult volunteers ages 18 to 50 years received varying doses of the WEVEE vaccine (6, 30 or 60 micrograms) by intramuscular injection. Participants then returned to receive the same dose as a boost eight weeks later. Some participants also received a formulation of the experimental vaccine that contained an alum adjuvant added to increase immune responses. Investigators report that the vaccine was safe, well-tolerated and induced durable immune responses against all three viruses. The highest neutralizing antibody response was observed in participants who received the 30-microgram dose with adjuvant. The authors note that the findings support further clinical evaluation of the vaccine candidate.
NIAID has executed a commercialization license for the advanced development of the WEVEE vaccine candidate to the life sciences company Emergent BioSolutions in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Funding for manufacturing of WEVEE clinical trial material and pre-clinical studies was funded in part by an Interagency Agreement between NIAID and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Joint Program Executive Office Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND).
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Materials provided by NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

People are more likely to choose a healthy food option than an unhealthy food option among people from different social groups because they fear being judged negatively for their choices.
New research, co-authored by Bayes Business School, found that that the presence of individuals from different friendship or social groups played a role in influencing consumers’ food choices.
The study, which explored food choices with those of a different race and from a different university, explains this occurs because individuals anticipate more negative judgement from outsiders. The research, which spoke to around 1,000 individuals in total, shows that people often self-categorise in terms of their race, university affiliation, and work affiliation.
Experiments with several hundred adults in a large US city and university found participants were more likely to choose a healthy snack in the presence of an observer of a different race (as opposed to the same race) or one affiliated with a different university (as opposed to their own university). This was because they anticipated more negative judgment from an outsider group, and they therefore attempted to mitigate these judgments by making healthier food choices.
Four separate experiments supported the authors’ view that the presence of a stranger from a different social group (compared to a stranger from one’s own group — such as their own university) impacted the participants’ food choice.
In one experiment, 180 students were offered the choice between indulgent M&Ms and healthier raisins as a snack. When in the presence of an unknown fellow student from one’s own university, only 12 per cent of students selected the healthier raisins. However, this number more than doubled to 31 per cent when in the presence of an unknown student from another university.
The other experiments showed that the reason for this pattern is that people feel judged to a larger extent by outgroup members, and they strategically use healthy food choices to make a positive impression to counter this negative judgement. For example, 200 consumers were told that others around them were judgemental or were tolerant. In the judgemental environment, consumers were more likely to choose carrots over cookies than in the tolerant environment, which indicates that expected judgement from others explains the findings.
Last month the Action on Sugar and Obesity Health Alliance called on the UK Government to act against the difference in sugar content and portion size of popular snacks. Despite many attempts to help consumers make healthier choices, consumers often struggle to maintain a healthy diet. This research finds that one way to promote a healthy diet could be to advertise the social benefits of healthy choices.
Dr Janina Steinmetz, Associate Professor (Reader) of Marketing at Bayes, said the findings have practical implications for marketers of healthy foods and policy makers hoping to promote healthy eating.
“We know that food plays an important role in social life and consumers often make inferences about others’ traits and characteristics based on their food choices.
“Our research shows that we can use this important role of food for consumer welfare if we highlight that healthy food is not only good for consumers, but also helps them to impress others. These findings could be very significant to those hoping to improve healthy eating practices in the UK because they open a new avenue to promote the benefits of healthy eating: It’s good for you and your health, and it’s also good for making a positive impression.”
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Materials provided by City University London. Original written by Luke Lambert. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

New research from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research examines how cavefish, surface-dwelling river fish that flooded into underground cave systems over 100,000 years ago, developed unique metabolic adaptations to survive in nutrient-scarce environments. The study, published online in Nature Genetics on May 12, 2022, led by Jaya Krishnan, PhD, a senior research associate in the lab of Nicolas Rohner, PhD, created a genome-wide map of liver tissue for two independent colonies of cavefish along with river fish to understand how cavefish metabolism evolved and how this may be applicable for humans.
Historically, humans have been able to adapt during periods of feast or famine. Today, however, feast has replaced famine in many regions around the globe leading to a rise in a host of diseases related to metabolism such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Collectively called metabolic syndrome, these conditions are associated with genetic mutations in regions of DNA that regulate how our genes work to keep us healthy; on an evolutionary timescale, the constant “feast state” is in its infancy, which for humans, means disease rather than adaptation.
This study marks the first time genetic mapping of the non-coding regions of liver DNA that act to regulate gene activity and expression have been performed. The new data is a now valuable resource for the scientific community studying starvation resistance and metabolism.
“It’s a very good foundation for us or anyone to now ask relevant questions in relation to metabolism, diet, and adaptation,” said Krishnan.
Metabolism, or the way in which we utilize and store energy, is an integral part of health in all species. Cavefish are ideal for studying metabolism; during periodic flooding of caves, these fish intake and store all the nutrition they need to survive until the next nutrient inundation, which may not be for another year. “They can shed light on metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity,” said Krishnan, because, despite elevated fat and blood glucose levels, these fish remain vibrant and healthy.
“The fact that these fish are apparently healthy, despite having these extreme traits is, by definition, a good place to ask how they deal with that,” said Rohner.
What is truly remarkable is that the two independently derived cavefish colonies examined in this study evolved strikingly similar metabolic adaptations to survive in dark, nutrient-scarce environments. This raises the question, what can we learn from animals who have had the time to evolve? And even further, if multiple cavefish populations evolved in a very similar manner completely independently from each other, are there universal adaptation mechanisms that could potentially be triggered in other species like humans?
“We know only a handful of genes that could be therapeutic targets,” said Krishnan. “This means we need to adopt novel ways to identify such potential genes so that we can investigate them, and cavefish are a very powerful system for us to do that.”
Coauthors include Christopher W. Seidel, PhD, Ning Zhang, PhD, Narendra Pratap Singh, PhD, Jake VanCampen, Robert Peuß, PhD, Shaolei Xiong, Alexander Kenzior, Hua Li, PhD, and Joan W. Conaway, PhD.
Funding for the study was provided by JDRF, the Edward Mallinckrodt Foundation, the National Institutes for Health (award R01GM127872), the National Science Foundation (award IOS-1933428), the Enabling Discovery through GEnomics of the National Science Foundation (award 1923372), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (award PE2807/1-1) and by institutional support from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

Ongoing worldwide research of diverse populations by an international team of scientists, including a University of Massachusetts Amherst genetic epidemiologist, has shed important new light on how genes contribute to type 2 diabetes.
The study was published Thursday, May 12, in Nature Genetics. “Our findings matter because we’re moving toward using genetic scores to weigh up a person’s risk of diabetes,” says co-author Cassandra Spracklen, assistant professor of biostatistics and epidemiology in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences.
The meta-analysis by the DIAMANTE (DIabetes Meta-ANalysis of Trans-Ethnic association studies) Consortium of 122 different genome-wide association studies (GWAS) was co-led by Andrew Morris, professor of statistical genetics at The University of Manchester, and University of Oxford professors Mark McCarthy and Anubha Mahajan.
“The global prevalence of type 2 diabetes, a life-changing disease, has quadrupled over the last 30 years, affecting approximately 392 million people in 2015,” Morris says.
The research is a major step toward the ultimate goal of identifying novel genes and understanding the biology of the disease, which has the potential to help scientists develop new treatments.
It is also an important milestone in the development of “genetic risk scores” to identify individuals who are more predisposed to develop type 2 diabetes, regardless of their population background.

Fresh techniques to aid seizure diagnosis and surgical planning stand to benefit millions of epilepsy patients, but the path to progress has been slow and challenging. New research from Carnegie Mellon University’s Bin He and his team, in partnership with UPMC and Harvard Medical School, introduces a novel network analysis technology that uses minimally invasive resting state electrophysiological recordings to localize seizure onset brain regions and predict seizure outcomes.
Epilepsy affects about 70 million people around the world and more than 3.4 million Americans. Of those affected, roughly a third cannot be treated by drugs alone. For these patients, surgical removal of seizure originating tissues or neuromodulation procedures are potential treatment avenues in order to maintain quality of life.
In current practice, prior to any surgical removal of tissues, clinicians often drill holes into the skull to place recording electrodes atop the brain. The electrodes record electrical activity in the brain over the course of days or weeks, however long it takes for seizure(s) to materialize, to inform of where seizure(s) are taking place. While necessary, this practice can be time-consuming, costly, and uncomfortable for patients to stay in hospital for days to weeks.
An alternative to the current clinical routine has been developed by He and his collaborators and recently published in Advanced Science. Their novel network analysis technique can pinpoint seizure originating brain regions and predict a patient’s seizure outcome before surgery, using only 10 minutes of resting state recordings without the need to wait for seizures to occur.
“In a group of 27 patients, our accuracy of localizing seizure onset brain regions, was 88%, which is a fascinating result,” explained Bin He, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “We use machine learning and network analysis to analyze a 10-minute resting state recording to predict where the seizure will come out. While this method is still invasive, it is to a significantly decreased degree, because we’ve taken the recording timeline from multiple days or even weeks down to 10 minutes.”
He continued, “In the same group of patients, our accuracy of predicting their seizure outcome, or the possibility of becoming seizure-free post-surgery, was 92%. Eventually, this type of data could guide patients toward or away from surgery, and it is information that is not readily available today.”
The technique extracts information flow across all recording electrodes and makes a prediction based on the different levels of information flow. He and colleagues discovered that the information flow from non-seizure generating tissue to seizure originating tissue is much larger than the inverse direction, and the notably greater difference in information flow often leads to a seizure-free outcome. Once implemented, this approach could have a major impact to inform clinicians and families if a patient should pursue a surgery and what the likelihood of surgical success would be.
Helping patients continues to be He’s driving motivation and overarching goal. By focusing on non-invasive and minimally-invasive approaches, He believes both the patient and healthcare system can benefit.
“This research not only will provide information about the likelihood of surgical success to individuals with epilepsy and their caregivers, but it will also help us to understand the underlying mechanisms of seizures using a minimally-invasive approach,” said Vicky Whittemore, Ph.D., program director, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a part of the National Institutes of Health.
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Materials provided by College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University. Original written by Sara Vaccar. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.